Pondering the Angelus with Art

The First Joyful Mystery: The Annunciation
Stained Glass window from St Josaphat Basilica, Milwaukee

Hail, star illumined by the sun, hail:
through you creation has been renewed.

You are the heavenly stairway
through which God has descended.

You are the earth
of the fruit that never perishes.

You are the key
to the doors of paradise.

(From the Byzantine liturgy)

Pondering the Angelus with Art

Annunciation Window by Cornelia Rota.

Prayer to Mary, "Cause of our Joy"

O Mary, who abandoned your soul to happiness by offering it to God,
grant that in our gift to God, our joy may be complete.

O Virgin radiant with joy, grant that we may believe in the happiness which God in his love wills to offer us.

Make joy bloom again in hearts given over to sadness;
Teach us to detach ourselves from worldly pleasures and to seek our happiness in God;
Help us to radiate the witness of Christian joy.

Through your presence in our lives, be for us the font of a joy which is ever new:
Jesus our Lord,

who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God,
forever and ever.
Amen.

Pondering the Angelus with Art

St. Hedwig's Church in Chicago provides this week's Angelus meditation with its Bavarian stained-glass depiction of the Annunciation, one of the many striking windows in a parish church built for a Polish community in 1901.